Monday, 24 September 2012

“It's Not Enough” - being an account of a Marnie Stern live show, interspersed with excerpts from an interview that didn't happen, as written for PEP! magazine in 2010...

Three
possible openings for this article:

(1)
It takes exactly one unanswered email, one ill-advised tape recorder
purchase, a morning's worth of dithering about voice recording apps
and half an afternoon of solid procrastination before if becomes
obvious that, in all likelihood, I am not going to be interviewing
Marnie Stern for PEP! Which is, as the kids say in crudely
fictionalised versions of the early nineties, a bit of a bummer.

Or
at least, it's mostly a bummer. Don't get me wrong, I genuinely
want to meet Marnie Stern – she's my favourite living songwriter,
after all and her music gave me a kick up the arse in 2007 without
which I probably wouldn't be writing this now - but as the
realisation that the interview isn't going to happen sinks in the
disappointment gives way to another feeling: relief.

Thank
fuck, I find myself thinking, at least I don't have to go through with it
now...

(2)
So I'm standing in the cramped but chic basement of The Captain's
Rest, in the West End of Glasgow on a Monday night in late November.
Outside it's so cold that piss is icing up before it has time to
splash in the gutter, but in here it's so hot that freshly spilled
beer is quickly evaporating from my trousers. On the stage in front
of me is Marnie Stern, aka Marnie “Fucking!" Stern (guitar,
vocals); to her left and her right respectively are her bandmates, Nithin
Kalvakota (bass) and Vince Rogers (drums).

I have managed to drag
two friends with me out into this tiny rock club on this most
inhospitable of nights: my pal Scott, who knows a bit about Marnie Stern's
music, having been subjected to it by one of his more pretentious and
objectionable friends (me), and my friend Liam K who hasn't heard so
much as a note of it before tonight, and seems to have to have come
expecting to see a folk act based on the garbled information he
received from one of his more annoyingly cryptic acquaintances (me again).

The
first two songs have already blazed past us but the levels have been
decidedly squiffy so far, with Marnie's guitar and vocal parts buried
under the almighty racket of her backing track and rhythm section.

I don't know about you but when it comes to recommending things
(meaning: books, bands, songs, movies, television shows, comedians,
etc) to my friends I'm so uptight I'm almost paralytic. I've
suggested hundreds of books to strangers while working in retail, but
ask me to recommend a book to someone who I actually know and like
and I'll equivocate your til you give up dancing with the cows and
decide to go home. So it's awkward, standing there, worrying about
whether the people I've brought along with are enjoying the show,
worrying, though I'd never admit it, about whether the show is living
up to my (phenomenally high) expectations.

And
then, as Marnie plays the frantic hammer-ons that signal the start of
'Transformer', all of these concerns start to seem terribly
stupid. The sound problems quickly transform from a pressing
concern to a hazy memory. Every frantic note is now ringing out
clearly now, and the combined effect is simply immense – imagine,
if you can, the intro to The Who's 'Baba O'Riley' played at speed. I
look at Liam, who's currently in the middle of shouting “Oh
shit!” as his jaw drops to the floor like he's a cartoon wolf. I can't see Scott, but I'm past worrying about what he's getting out
of this now.

This
is everything I'd hoped it would be, this is everything I needed it
to be, and trust me – that's really saying something!

(3)
No, stop! Don't flick away. Or at least, son't flick away yet.

Chances
are that very few of you will have heard of Marnie Stern's, and that
even fewer of you will have heard her music. I understand how that
might put you off, but bear with me for a minute and you'll discover
that what this article is really all about is fear, depression,
self-confidence, communication, and genuinely awesome music.

If
you care about any of those things, trust me, you'll be fine here.
More to the point, if you care about any of those things then you
might want to check out some of Stern's music too, since it deals
with this stuff in a way that's both bracingly direct and endlessly complicated.

***

You
Shall Know Our Velocity

Speaking of all things
bracing and direct: those first two songs!

As I've already
mentioned, the mixing wasn't great when Marnie's set started, but
she and her band still managed to find a certain amount of grace
during these numbers, despite the wonky sonics. Given that Stern's
songs are often about working hard to achieve something, there
was a certain poetic resonance involved in watching her battle to
make those songs work – a battle which, having presumably been won
several times over in the process of writing and recording the songs
in the first place, you could all forgive Stern for feeling
exasperated at having to fight over again.

So: while you might have
struggled to hear the lyrics to set-opener 'Nothing Left', there
were also plenty of fragments of meaning that you just couldn't miss
(“The mad man told me not to walk that plank!”/“This DOES
matter!”), and these poetic shards were given ample context by
the guitar break that kicked in after the first chorus, a beautiful
bit of mathy finger-tapping that sounded strangely calm until it
fast-forwarded into the rush of Vince's drums, sketching out the
meaning of the song before obliterating it over and again. It was a
perfect example of the sort of controlled chaos that Marnie
specialises in; more than that, the sound of a woman walking the
plank, blindfolded, not knowing when she's going to drop and not
worrying about it either.

In defiance of the
still-muffled mix, the second song of the night, 'For Ash', was even
better. The density of the recorded version was missed as the song
lifted off, the glorious rush of drums and guitars lost in the sonic
smog, but when it crashed back down into the first verse you got a
pretty good idea of its trajectory. On the album version this shift
is harsh, as it should be – this is, after all, a song about an
ex-boyfriend who has committed suicide. The intro to the recorded
version is gloriously unselfconscious, its wailing
AAAIII-AAHH-AAY-AAH vocal refrain the sound of an artist free from
gravity, but the time change into the verse brings everything back to
earth. All memory of the triumphant beginning is buried by a
juddering, stop-start rhythm which practically obscures Marnie as she
sings:

Well I don't remember
how you got awayAnd the sky and the trees were falling out of
place

Gratifyingly enough for
someone with my English Lit damage, the sound and lyrics are working
together to tell the same story here, a story of one life ended and
another interrupted. At the Captain's Rest the effect was different,
the sound was less full, the shifts between guitar parts less smooth.
This should have destabilised the song, but instead it freed it up,
giving it a immediacy that made a different kind of sense of the
lyrics.

On record the most
painful lines can be found in the chorus:

I cannot bear

No one compares

I miss your smile

Sadness all the while

These lines don't look
like much written down, but in context they could break you like Ivan
Drago. The key is in the arrangement, as it always is with Marnie
Stern songs – these lines come through as little moments of clarity
in the middle of all that chaos, and their openness seems startling
rather than clumsy.

Played live, 'For Ash'
sounds less like a song 'about' trying to make sense of a senseless
death, and more like an example of someone trying to do exactly that;
in the cluttered confines of the Captain's Rest, the most upsetting
lines were ones that remain almost-inaudible to me on the record:

How can it be and I'll
never, I'll never know why?

I want to be in your
beautiful, limited light

Hearing this simple
expression of longing and confusion as if for the first time on the
night of the concert, I found myself freshly relieved that I didn't
have to interview Marnie Stern after all. The chances are that I
would have raved and gibbered and made a fool out of myself trying to
talk about moments like this. Better not to bother, then, to let
your relationship be confined to the music and to the occasional
self-indulgent blog post, or magazine article...

***

Interview
Fragment #1:

David
Allison:On
record, your songs are really intricately layered – does it ever
give you a headache trying to work out how to play them live?

Marnie
Stern:
YES!!!!! This last record is the simplest in terms of layering, so
that was at least a relief. But some of the others, boy! What a pain
in the ass! Sometimes when I'm writing I think, “How
the hell am I gonna play this live?”,
but I usually manage to figure something out.

DA:One of the things I love about your music is the way that it plays
with and against your lyrics – when you’re writing the songs, do
you compose words and music simultaneously or is the process a bit
more fragmented than that?

MS:
More
fragmented. Sometimes I write down words and sentences while I'm
reading. That way, when I sit down and come up with a guitar part,
I'll have something to try and sing. Most of the time though, because
the guitar parts are kind of precise, the cadence doesn't fit
properly and I have to sit there and try and come up with more
lyrics. Sometimes when I do it that way, I find that the lyrics end
up fitting the mood of the guitar sounds better than I would have
expected because I am tapped into the emotion of the song.

DA:You’ve
talked a bit about how you want to write a classic rock song without
resorting to cliché. I think you’ve got a good run of cliché-free
classics behind you now, but do you feel like you’ve managed it
yet?

MS:
Certain parts of songs yes, but as a complete whole song, no. Some of
the classic rock songs have been such staples in my life that I often
wonder if I really have any clear perspective at all on them. I
wonder if I had heard 'Gimme Shelter' by The Stones when it came out,
if I'd think it was as precious as I do now.

***

Ten
reasons why Marnie Stern's new, self-titled album is the best album
of 2010:

For Ash

Nothing
Left

Transparency
is the New Mystery

Risky
Biz

Female
Guitar Players are the New Black

Gimme

Cinco
De Mayo

Building
a Body

Her Confidence

The Things You Notice

***

"I've
stood here and watched humans – frail flesh creatures – fight and
die for their world. CAN I DO LESS?"

Of course, the funny
thing is that I did manage to interview Marnie Stern in the end, just
not face-to-face. The day after the gig, I received an apologetic
email from Family Ltd, who represent Marnie in the UK. The basic
gist of it was the person I'd been dealing with had been off on the
day of the concert, so hadn't confirmed the interview – cue a
chorus of boos from the gallery. But wait! He was nice, he seemed
genuine, and he did ask if I wanted to do the interview either by
email or over the phone, so...

***

A
review of Marnie Stern's second album,This
Is It and I Am It and You Are It and So Is That and He Is It and She
Is It and It Is It and That Is That,
as written and published in September 2008:

“I
cannot be all these things to you/It's true”
she sings, that oddly childlike voice straining to be heard over the
electric crackle of 'Transformer'. You’d almost say she makes it
sound easy as she finds gaps in the noise in which to shout "The
future is yours, so fill this part in",
but nothing sounds easy on a Marnie Stern record. These twelve tracks
are science experiments, attempts to understand the rush of new
guitar knowledge that Stern discovered on her debut album. As such,
there are fewer ecstatic revelations here, but listen to the way that
obtuse guitar fragments joyously fail to cohere on 'Shea Stadium' or
layer into something both dense and brittle in ‘Clone Cycle’ and
tell me what you hear. Are these vain displays of virtuosity or acts
of self-creation in sound? Album closer 'The Devil Is In The Details'
answers this question in a typically giddy fashion, with Stern
offering herself up to the world and letting it see her change from
moment to moment, guitar line to guitar line. "The
devil is in the details/If you are ready"
she sings, and she's right. How can Marnie Stern be everything to
you? She doesn’t seem sure, but she’s ready to try if you're
willing to keep up. Soon Stern will be invincible, a chimerical
machine made out of layered vocals and art rock histrionics, but
right now it’s thrilling to hear her struggle to master the strange
energies she’s unleashed.

***

“He
was devoid of plus”

Marnie and her band
played four songs from This Is It... at The Captain's Rest:
the aforementioned 'Transformer', 'Shea Stadium', 'The CrippledJazzer' and 'Prime', which latter involved an audience clap-along
that petered out early but was at least more coordinated that then
sloppy communal time-keeping I once witnessed at a Radiohead gig in
Aberdeen.

I've lived with these
songs for the past couple of years, so to me they're already classics
- hence the slightly fawning tone of my interview questions!
Which... I'm being harsh on myself here, but at the same time I'm
aware that I am completely incapable being objective about this
music. Which makes me wonder if anyone but a vain egotist could ever
truly think that they had created a “classic” in any medium.
Doesn't this level of appreciation require a bit of distance, a bit
of context, a bit of fannish enthusiasm? Don't let academics fool
you on that count, they're just nerds who're good at paperwork. Don't
let music journalists bullshit you either, cos they're just nerds who
know how to make good on a few easy connections, no more and no less.

Anyway, there's something
deeply gratifying and weird about seeing a cult act you genuinely
love play live, to know that they're playing well and to know that
other people know this too. It's oddly thrilling to see other people
clapping along to 'Prime' as Marnie sings “I feel close to
dolphins and no one else”; it makes you wonder if other
people actively enjoy that gloriously awkward line to the extent
that you do.

As such, it was massively
gratifying to see Liam's face when Marnie was playing the into to
'Transformer', to just straight-up know that the song's arty
pop-metal awesomeness is not just a niche concern, to know that for a
moment there, you weren't on your own with this one.

On the way home from the
gig, my friend Scott said something about 'The Crippled Jazzer' being
so good that he wanted to die right there, and... well it was a
ludicrously overblown, almost Morrisey-esque statement but if you're
anything like me then you would have found it almost impossible to
disagree too...

***

Interview
Fragment #2:

DA:I loved your second album, This Is It…, right away, but on the
first listen through I thought The Crippled Jazzer was the least
exciting track on there. Since this is 100% backwards, I was
wondering if I’m actually the stupidest man on the planet?

MS: That is a fun
song to play live, but I can see how it can come across as pretty
monotone and boring. It's pretty much straight up rock, with the
exception of a few time changes, but for some reason when I play it
live I never get sick of it. So I'm 100% with you on that one!!

DA:
Your new self-titled album rocks harder and looser than the two
before it without sacrificing any of the complexity. Was this
something you were consciously pushing for?MS: Yeah. I was
trying to make it looser so that there was more breathing room, but I
find it hard to keep the quality and integrity of the parts intact
when I'm trying that. The biggest lesson I've learned from
songwriting is that space is so important to let the song grow.DA:
Marnie Stern is
also probably your most overwhelmingly emotional album so far. Which…
describing it that way makes it sound like a Korn album or something,
but it’s really kicked my arse this year. Did you feel
self-conscious, putting some of those feelings across so openly?MS:
After I had healed a
bit from what I was going through emotionally and looked back at what
I had put down, I sure was embarrassed. But in the end, I could never
put anything down that wasn't honest to what I was feeling, so I
think it turned out alright.

***

“I
rip the desert up/But it's not enough...”

By
the time Marnie and her band played 'Risky Biz', 'Transparency is the
New Mystery' and 'Cinco de Mayo' at The Captain's Rest, the musicians
on-stage had relaxed enough to make it obvious that what they have
together is deeply idiosyncratic; a personal grammar of sound,
if you'll allow me to get even more flowery for a couple of minutes.

I
mean sure, you can easily work out who Marnie's borrowed some of her tricks from – you can tell that she's internalised and understood
Sleater-Kinney's most intricately devastating album, The Hot Rock, better than anyone else, and the involvement of Hella drummer Zach
Hill in all of her recordings to date makes it hard to ignore the
influence of the more frantically experimental side of American rock
(Lightning Bolt, Deerhoof, Hella et al). The tricky thing is that
none of this train-spotting explains what Stern actually does
with these influences.

Even
at their most introspective, Sleater-Kinney were always raging
against or reaching out to someone, whereas with Stern's songs every
mention of “you” feels like a desperate attempt to
remember the outside world made by someone on the verge of
solipsistic collapse. And thrilling as they can be, none of those
arty-experimentalists can match Marnie Stern for emotional impact.

These
three new songs are case in point, and they show me quite how wrong I
was about where Marnie would go after her second record. “Soon
Stern will be invincible” I said - why, because she can play
guitar better than me or any of my friends? Did it not stand to
reason that she would turn whatever mastery she had found to do
something else?

'Risky
Biz' was the first of these three songs to be played on the night; it
was a genuinely devastating performance, the perfectly controlled
guitar patterns hinting at something beyond the singer's control as
they broke apart in every chorus. As blogger and music critic
Matthew Perpetua wrote on 5th October 2010:

“What
kills me about “Risky Biz” is that it mostly sounds optimistic.
She’s singing about knowing that she’ll have to give up, she’s
singing about how whatever she does is not enough, but despite
miserable chances, she’s holding on to the hope that things will
turn out right. Why? Because he outshines them all, duh. And so the
anxiety is somehow worth it, even when it’s so obvious that she’s
giving up too much of herself, and she should just let go, cut her
losses, move on. It’s so sad, and so sweet. The longing comes
through in every note she plays, every aching syllable she sings, but
most especially in that fragile, wordless backing vocal that
punctuates the verses. That’s the pain, hidden deep below the
surface, but totally obvious all along.”

He's
right, of course, though it's worth noting that the backing vocal
takes extra prominence in the live environment, since Marnie has to
actually cut-off the end of the some lines in order to be able to
sing it. Just another perfect example of anxiety encroaching on
optimism, hinting that eventually it will overtake everything.

'Cinco
De Mayo' was even more brutal than this on the night, not least of
all because it was a hell of a lot louder! If 'Transformer' sounds like 'Baba O'Riley' played superfast, then 'Cinco De Mayo' sounded
like the same song collapsing in on itself, the signal blurring into
the distressed noise. It's the second song on Marnie Stern
that's addressed to Ash, and again, its directness is astonishing,
the chorus' clear statement that “You always be here, and hear,
and hear, and hear” giving way to a final, pained wish: “I
hope you see god...”

This
one line is... I'll be honest, it's too direct for me to deal with
honestly here. It's a sentence I'm incapable of thinking, let alone
singing, so I wouldn't know what to do with it. I'm not brave enough.

Better
to move on to the less intimidating traumas of 'Transparency is the
New Mystery', a song that lives up to its title in terms of both its
lyrics and its composition – seriously, the guitar part on the
verses is just two notes going back and forth! It's almost a slap to
the face of anyone who's written Stern off as a musical onanist!
Turns out on the night that two notes are all you need
when they're the right two notes, and you know how to play them.

Which
Stern and her band clearly do, and did!

On
the album, the way the verse dips at the end of the first “I do”
is pretty much the most gutting part of any song released in 2010,
all of those hopes dropping off into the stutter-pulse of bass and
drums...

Live,
it was still effective, but it was even more clear that this is what
Marnie Stern (the album) is all about: no matter how much you
believe in yourself, belief itself is not enough. Talent is not
enough. Commitment, passion, and an honest-to-fuck personal vision?
Those are all great qualities, but they're no guarantee of anything
beyond themselves.

And
so the chorus ran out, mantra like, in the uncanny heat on that
November night I felt crushed all over again.

“It's
not enough/I'm not enough” –well, we can all relate
to that, right?

***

Like
a Theme Park Ride, I Should Come With a Splash Warning...

This is all getting a
little big bit hyperbolic, so let's take it down a notch with a boozy
wee anecdote shall we?

Overly
cautious nerd that I am, I was at the Captain's Rest pretty early.
After kicking about in the bar for a while with Scott and a couple of
friends of his who we'd bumped into (Emma and Olly, both very indie,
both very good company!), we finally got downstairs and into the
venue, drinks in hand. None of us could identify the music that was
being played over the PA down there, but Scott was pretty sure we
were hearing math rock covers of old computer game theme tunes.
You're probably aware of the Shazam application, which identifies
songs from samples taken live on the spot; it's is a bit of a thorn
in my cock right, if I can be honest with you. I've spent a lot of
time being working on my nerdy, pedantic knowledge of music, and it
boils my pish to think that you can skip all that and get all the
information you need by slapping a few buttons. Thankfully, I'm also
fully aware of how ridiculous this position is, so a couple of button
presses later and we knew that we were listening to a band called The
Advantage, who were covering the theme from mission 5 in Double
Dragon 2, and that they and who thought it was a good idea to call an
album Elf-Titled.

While I was in the
process of jamming my Mandroid phone back in my pocket, I somehow
managed to throw the phone up into the air, away from my left hand
and towards the plastic cup full of beer that was in my right one.
While I was spasming to catch the damned thing, I also happened to
tip a good third of the aforementioned beer over myself and the
lovely Scott. If this sounds like a badly executed sitcom
“incident”, then that's probably what it looked like as it
happened too, going by some of the harsh glances it drew our way.
The end result of all this stupidity was that while we were waiting
for the bands to start playing, we were also sitting in a puddle of
cheap booze, with me feeling less like a dynamic young intellectual
and more like a clumsy arsehole.

Can you wax poetic while
you look like you've just wee'd yourself? Can you interview one of
your heroes while smelling like a football fan's armpit on the
morning after a big defeat? You probably could, but I wouldn't fancy
trying either – I'd feel too obviously ridiculous, if you
know what I mean.

By the time the support
act had started playing, I had apologised to Scott approximately four
times, had made three variations on the same a joke about me not
being able to hold my drink, and was seriously considering
sacrificing my phone to the gods in order to appease my friend.
Thankfully, it's hard to stay in a sulk when you're exposed to a act
as preposterous as The Agitator. Take one mightily quiffed frontman,
have him sing like “an agit-prop Grover” (Scott's words,
not mine), provide him with two drummers for backup, and dress the
whole group up like extras from a Frankie Goes to Hollywood video (no
exageration here: they were wearing grey short sleeved shirts with
the word NO!
printed on the front in giant black letters), and what do you have?
“The worst support band ever!” according to more than one
reviewer. To be honest with you, I actually enjoyed them on the
night. I doubt that I'd ever listen to them again, but the
combinations of drums, more drums, anti-Government speeches and sub
Tom Waits vocalising was just so over-the-top and earnest that I
couldn't help but enjoy it.

Typing
these words I can hear Adam Ant touching himself and laughing - “See,
I told you ridicule was nothing to be scared of!” he
says before cackling like a loon from a Monty Python film. Still,
maybe the daft bastard was right – is the fear of seeming absurd
ever a good reason for inactivity? Life, art, politics – all of
these things can be pretty ridiculous, but that doesn't preclude them
from being exciting and scarily important at the same time, does it?

I'm
not being rhetorical here, I'd really like to know!

***

Interview
Fragment #4:

DA:You made a
video for ‘Ruler’ that was a Rocky pastiche, and you did a cover
of Journey’s ‘Don’t Stop Believing’ that made the song sound
good to my jaded ears. I was wondering if these playful retro riffs
were just a goof, or if they were actually a slightly different
attempt at getting at some of your usual
themes?

MS: Actually, The
Journey song was done originally as a demo for the Shrek 3
soundtrack. I knew they wouldn't pick me, but I wanted to give it a
go anyway because it seemed like fun. Rocky is one of my favorite
movies of all time. I love sports movies that revolve around an
underdog, because I feel I can relate. There are plenty of those
movies ,but Rocky is my favorite one. Both those themes happen to be
based in the 70's/80's, but that was a coincidence.

DA:There’s
a really strong personality to your music – since
your mid-set
banter and blog posts are so crude and funny, I was wondering how
much you filter these parts of your personality out when you’re
writing your music, and how much these elements just end up
downplaying themselves?

MS:
I
never put the silly, banter side into my songs. I don't know why
really. Sometimes I'll throw in some funny singing part that is
really goofy, but it always ends up sounding so incredibly silly,
that I take it out. I guess because I spend so much time on the
songs, they end up being of the more serious nature. Good question
though! I need to think about that!

***

Vajamming dot
blogspot dot com

Because all art events in
Glasgow have a muppet quote, there were a couple of lumbering dafties
down near the stage at the Captain's Rest that night, neither of whom
could seem to stop yelling at the stage. “YOU'RE KILLING IT
TONIGHT MARNIE!” “I HEARD A RUMOUR YOU WERE GOING TO KILL IT
TONIGHT MELISSA!” “YOU'RE KILLING IT!” and so on, all
bawled in what I think was a cappy Glaswegian approximation of an
American accent. And no, I don't really know what the “Melissa”
thing was about either.

Marnie seemed baffled by
these interruptions – Glaswegian dialect has been known to baffle
many an English act, so it's no surprise that an Amercan would
struggle to work out what the fuck was being said - but Nithin
helped her out, providing rough translations from the side of the
stage. By way of trying to smooth the situation over, Marnie
admitted that she's not good with the accent or the lingo, but that
she had learned one Glaswegian word that she wants to test out.
Turns out the word was “Clunge”, or as Marnie had it:
“Clunge clunge clunge clunge clunge clunge clunge...” all
of this said in that chipper, high-pitched New York accent of hers.

“Clunge”, for
those of you who don't know, is a particularly grotty Glaswegian name
for the vagina, which... one of the weirder things about getting into
Marnie Stern's music via intriguing write-ups in Plan B magazine and
on various blogs was discovering that she has a seriously
scatological sense of humour. A sense of humour that is, in large
part, predicated on jokes about her own vagina. Hence “clunge”,
a word that makes more sense in the playground than at a rock concert
by an earnest young talent like Marnie Stern. It's hard to convey
exactly how this shtick works, but it does – partly because it's so
jarring and unexpected, and partly because Stern has a great
chemistry with her band, particularly bassist Nithin. I don't know,
go check out her blog if you want to see copious examples of that –
you can get the address from the title for this section of the essay.

Of course, just because I
asked Marnie why this sense of humour is largely absent from her work
doesn't mean that I think there's a clungey hole in her music or
anything like that. After all, what works so well in concert as a
way to keep a drunken crowd on side might seem merely incongruous on
an album, you know?

That said, it's not like
Marnie Stern's music is hideously po-faced. Stern doesn't make comedy
rock (thank fuck!), but even at their most overwhelmed and
overwhelming her songs are still too energetic to drag. What's more,
the more you attuned to Stern's whims you get, the more you realise
that humour does creep into her recorded output. It's there in the
way the chorus to a thrashing rock song that could be genuinely be
described as an experiment in suggestive synaesthesia ('Building aBody') references Field of Dreams. It's there in the Rocky
pastiches too, and in the goofy cheers and screams that preface the
haughtily titled 'Letters To Rimbaud'. The laughs are present,
they're just more constrained than it is in concert, much easier to
minimise while you're obsessing on other details. Also, let's be
honest here: funny art is in no way less impressive than ostensibly
“serious” art, it's just a different kind of difficult to
make/appreciate.

It's all about investment
and control, isn't it? You work hard on something and you're going
to want someone else to lose themselves in it too, unless you're
totally self-sustaining, in which case more power to you, you crazy
inhuman freak! Of course once something's out there in the world
you lose control of it to an extent. No matter how hard you worked on
it, there's always going to be some loudmouthed asshole intent on
hollering nonsense at you, or some geeky dude with a laptop full of
overly verbose questions.

This is okay though! It
leads to odd things like me thinking that Marnie's cover of 'Don't
Stop Believing' is actually a bold, cunning statement of what her
work is all about, even when that wasn't the intent at all. If art
is a controlled space in which we can act out and play around with
some of the shit that matters to us, maybe it's good that we (being
both the artists and those engaging with the art) are frequently
reminded that it's not too safe.

Otherwise, it might all
just feel pointless in the end.

***

A
review of Marnie Stern's first album, In
Advance of the Broken Arm,
as written and published in June 2008:

At
first the blast of drums and guitars and vocals that makes up your
typical Marnie Stern song might sound like an explosion in a music
shop, but don't run for cover right away. Pay attention to the
virtuoso fragments as they whiz past your ears and you'll realise
that that songs such as 'Vibrational Match' and 'Plato's Fucked Up
Cave' contain beautiful melodies in their jagged tangents. What does
it sound like? Like Sleater Kinney blasted into a million art rock
pieces, all intricate guitar parts and songs that combust and
re-combust as they go on.

This is music that
constantly challenges itself to get better, more imaginative. It'd
sound hectoring if there wasn't so much going on, if every song
weren't a firecracker full of ideas, just waiting to seen, heard,
described, imitated, and dreamed of. On album closer 'Patterns of aDiamond Ceiling', Stern describes her method while she demonstrates
it. "The picture in
my head is my reward"
she says, and you believe her, but you know that the picture wouldn't
be half so valuable if there weren't listeners to misinterpret it for
themselves. By the time all of the elements in the song have been
brought together to ignite, you've learned Stern's methods, and it's
time to burn your own picture into the sky. You've got the tools,
you've got the know-how: go!

***

“Mythology
come take me away”

Marnie
Stern and her band only played two songs from In Advance of the
Broken Arm at The Captain's Rest: 'Vibrational Match' and 'ThisAmerican Life'. Both songs are less direct than anything else that
was played on the night, but that doesn't mean that they were any
less affecting - Stern's music is built on crazy, complicated
drum/guitar/vocal patterns, and those songs both provided that in its
purest form, with everything constantly ramping up towards a world of
infinite complexity, infinite abstraction, never quite getting there
but never quite giving up either.

The
message is simple if you can bring yourself to believe it:

Don't
stop believing.

***

Interview
Fragment #5:

DA: I’ve read
that you used to practice for a scary 6-8 hours a day, but that you
now spend the time working on your songs. Is it important for you to
always be working towards something? This theme runs through songs like The Crippled Jazzer and Logical Volume,
and for a lazy schlub like me it’s both kinda scary and
inspirational at the same time!

MS:
Yes. I think
I always have to have some kind of goal ahead of me, some kind of
drive to get better and keep going. It's actually kind of sick
though, because I can never seem to just stop and enjoy the moment
I'm in! In other area of life, I am EXTREMELY lazy, and I have no
idea why working on music is a different story for me.

***

'Her
Confidence'

Truthfully, I get that
Marnie's music sounds like hard work to a lot of people. The
introduction to this song, for example, is pretty much just a dead
wall of guitar noise over a deadened drum beat. But when the verse
starts, and you hear the biggest, scariest guitar riff of 2010 it
becomes obvious that this is actually pretty straightforward in the
end, that this is music that hits on the physical level first. It's
the penultimate track on Marnie Stern, and it was the last song
played before the encore at The Captain's Rest - as the drums
skittered away from the power of that guitar part, daring you not to
do the same, it wouldn't exactly have taken too much effort to see
why it fills this slot both live and on record.

The dichotomy between raw
power and total collapse is central to Marnie's music and it's never
been more clearly expressed than it is in this song. At the end of
each verse, 'Her Confidence' tips down into the abyss of noise, but
the band always pull it back again, finding meaning in the chaos.
The song's instrumental coda makes good on its title, with that riff
raging out again, winding down without sounding even a little bit
defeated, the totality of the song sounding just that little bit more
intimidating than it did at the start. It feels... well, let's not
piss about any longer, it feels like coming out of a depression.
More specifically, it feels like knowing that you could slip back
down into that depression at any moment, and trying to stay hopeful
that you'll be able to fight your way out again.

With the right help, that
is.

You see, both live and on
record, “Marnie Stern” is a team effort. For all that her songs
flirt with solipsism, she's obviously driven by collaboration –
primarily with Hella drummer Zach Hill, who has played on all three
of her records, and with artist Bella Foster, who has provided arty
for all of her albums, and who is apparently one of Stern's closest
friends.

The live show is
similarly collaborative in a way that few rock shows actually are
these days. Nithin watches Marnie cautiously throughout the gig, his
chunky bass patterns holding her most intricate flourishes together,
while Vince flails away at his kit, trying to keeps up with Zach
Hill's frantic drums fills without overpowering everything else –
no small feat, given that Hill's recorded drum parts sound like an
infinite number of drum kits falling down an infinite number of
stairs.

A slightly absurd
comparison to make, I know, but nevertheless – this is what it
feels like.

***

Three
possible endings for this article...

(1) We lingered about a bit
after the show, trying to work out what to do next. Eventually
Liam K, the incorrigible charmer that he is, bounded up to the stage
to compliment Nithin on his bass playing, yammering away at the
bewildered yank like the unusually articulate puppy he is. Upstairs Marnie
and Vince were selling merch to anyone who would buy it, including
the aforementioned lumbering dafties, with whom the band members
chatted away amiably enough.

After a bit of prodding from Scott and
Liam, I finally agreed to go speak to Stern. Liam wanted me to try to
score the interview, and while I still had the eagerly purchased
dictaphone in my pocket, I couldn't pretend that I was overly keen to
use it. The whole idea seemed too gauche, too geeky, to openly
embarrassing. Instead I went for the dignified option, which turned
out to be babbling incoherently at Marnie while getting her to sign a
copy of her new album. She was very sweet about it, but there was no
mistaking me for someone capable of asking interesting questions To
be honest, I've never known what to do with an easy connection like
this. I'm too conflicted, too caught up in my own enthusiasms.

I'm a fan, in other words, loathe as I
am to apply that word to myself

A few weeks later, the NME ran an “On
the Road With Marnie Stern” article that made me chuckle when I
read it in the newsagents (I don't pay for the NME, because I was
raised to believe that you bought toilet roll before it was covered
in shit, rather than after). It covered a couple of the gigs that
Marnie had played just prior to her Glasgow show, and part of the
hook was that at the end of every gig she plays, Marnie is approached
by dictaphone-wielding blogger in search of an interview.

You can break chronology to add that
to the list of reasons I didn't ask for the interview if you want.
I'm aware that I'm typical of Marnie Stern's adoring male audience,
and I would pay good money to avoid being transformed into a funny
detail in an NME feature too. This might seem slightly pointless
given that I've deliberately cast myself as a Charlie Kaufmancharacter in this article, someone paralysed by his own
self-consciousness, totally overexcited but yet unable to live in the
moment, all that crap. Rest assured: I AM VERY GOOD FUN AT PARTIES
and I've got a letter from my mum to prove it.

Here's the thing though: when it
became obvious that the interview wasn't going to go ahead as
planned, I felt the outline of this article forming in my head. I
saw the shape of it, knew that it reflected the themes that I wanted
to write about, and knew that it was something I could do the way I
wanted, for the most part. I could see that there were plenty of
factors beyond my control, but that was okay.

I was pretty sure I could make them
part of the story too.

(2) This
piece was conceived as an interview before circumstances and my
brain teamed up to corrupt it, so what better way to end than with
another interview fragment?

Hey, what can I say,
sometimes it's harder than it seems to get out of your own damn
head!

Interview
Fragment #6:

DA:What’s kicking your ass right now? Are
there any books/bands/movies, either old or new, that you want to
rave about?

MS: I've
been reading a ton of books lately to try and come up with ideas for
the next record. I usually work better off of books than music for
some reason. Sometimes I read garbage too, but it all helps me to
separate from this tiny bubble of the indie rock world, and it makes
me feel connected to everyone out there trying to create things (as
hokey as that sounds!). Last month, I particularly liked Freedom by
Jonathan Franzen and The Book Thief by Zusak

(3)
Imagine
“It's not enough/I'm not enough”
playing on a loop forever – I went to the Marnie Stern gig hoping
and fearing that it would explode the picture in my head into
something else, something more communal, a shared delusion. It was
a great gig, and
when Marnie screamed “WE
ARE CONNECTED GLASGOW!” in
the middle of 'Vibrational Match'... well, I'm sure I wasn't the
only one who thought of Spinal Tap with a smile, but I'm also sure
that I'm not the only one who wanted to experience that feeling too.

“What is this
darkness you speak of?”
Stern sings in the same song – well, it's only the space between
Self and Other, right? Rock music will never be enough to overcome
that, but it sometimes it feels like it might, and maybe somtimes
that's enough.